New endeavors

New endeavors

After a year-long hiatus from working for a literary journal, I’m pleased to announce that I will now be reading for Fjords Review, an absolutely lovely journal. I’m so excited about this new endeavor, and I hope you will consider submitting your best poetry and fiction!

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In other news, I went running this morning (a slow, slow progress, since I’m re-training after re-injuring an old injury) and started thinking about a creative nonfiction essay I wrote the day of my surgery. I’ve been thinking about it off and on since I wrote it, but haven’t been able to figure out how to approach it. I gave it to a friend to read over, but that was it. Finally, today, I came back from that run and edited it and even came up with an ending, when it had none before.

Sometimes, changing genres is exactly what I need to do. I read once that anytime you get to point in your writing where you’re stuck, try changing the form, or even the genre. I’ve had trouble with figuring out whether a poem needed to be in couplets or quatrains, so I changed it to prose. Seeing it as that block of text helped me figure out how to shape it. Topics I haven’t been able to broach in poetry (like my surgery, my trip to Greece, etc.), I’ve been able to express in fiction or creative nonfiction. There can be so much versatility in being a poet; there’s always a potential to switch, to envision space. I make up it’s a great deal harder for prose writers to make that switch, to shrink than to expand (any of you prose writers feel differently?).

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5 thoughts on “New endeavors”

How funny that you pose that final question on the very day I’m looking at poetry I wrote during the spring with the intention of revising and sending it out.

I’m so much more inclined toward big projects than short essays that I find there’s a lot of stuff I want to write about that just doesn’t have a home in my nonfiction. So that’s where poetry comes in. It’s fun, and challenging in a very different way, to work with smaller forms. (It’s also nice to be able to make some stuff up for a change.)

Also, since I never got a marked-up copy of that essay into your hands — it’s still in my backpack, though! — I’d be interested in seeing the revision. 🙂

Yeah, I think that change in genre IS fun BECAUSE it’s different. Sometimes, my poetry brain needs a break. Glad to hear it works for you that way too. 🙂 How’s editing your thesis going? (Also, thanks so much for your comments. I just sent you the new one. I hope it’s a better read! You’re a doll for pushing through the first one…).

ah that is an interesting idea! i just went to a writer’s conference where they kept saying how you need to write about what you are afraid to write about…but for me that is just difficult to do with poetry, maybe i should try tackling some of these subjects in nonfiction/fiction…

I read something once (can’t remember the book right now) about how we should try to write the things that are hard for us until they stop being hard for us to write. For me, changing the genre has helped take a step back. My husband read my CNF essay last night, and it was hard for him to read because he was there through my surgery and said some things he wasn’t proud of.